Tag: spam

July 23, 2016

What Are Those Time-Wasters Up To?

So, what rubbish emails and calls have there been to Brooklands Radio station in the last few days?

Apple offering 3 months of free unlimited downloads on ITunes as long as we verify our credentials and there’s a link to some website at sprinkleparky.com – obviously a scam to get our login information.

A financial services company in Bahrain wants to finance our company or any that we recommend and ask us to send them our business plan or project summary. What are they really after? Maybe British company details for a corporate scam or just contact details they can sell on. Pathetic.

An email promising a free Tesco voucher – but the email address is brilliantmarketing.eu which means it’s just a scam looking for leads.

A Mr. Roland Perret , head of luggage storage facilities at New Orleans airport wants to send us a shipment abandoned by a diplomat from London and containing a lot of money. But he wants 30% and an upfront processing fee of $3,700. There is no shipment of course, just greedy evil people wanting to take money from anyone they can.

Special offer – £500 off laser eye surgery. Wow – what a bargain . I must get laser eye surgery immediately for me and everyone I’ve ever met. Can you imagine someone wanting eye surgery because it’s on special offer? Perhaps the surgeon operates on two people at once to reduce the price?

These people just waste our time and clog up the Internet with rubbish.

July 13, 2016

How to Spot Scam Emails

Scam and spam emails may display some of the following characteristics:
Sender’s Email Address

The sender’s email address will display as whatever the sender wants it to e.g. Santander Accounts Department, but the actual email address is usually also available, depending on which email client you are using. It may be that you can right click on the address and see properties which will tell you the actual email address or maybe if you print the email then it will show.

If the actual email address doesn’t match the name then you probably have a scam message, especially if the actual email address is something like a Hotmail or Gmail account rather than a business email address.

If the sender’s email address doesn’t tally with the trusted organisation’s website address, then the message is a scam or spam.

Recipient’s Email Address

Scam emails are usually sent to out to large numbers of people so it will probably be addressed to either “Undisclosed recipients” or to the senders name. This can be a sign of a scam or spam email.

If the email does not use your proper name, but uses a non-specific greeting like “dear customer” that can mean scam or spam.

Subject

Emails from people you know will usually have a meaningful subject whereas emails from scammers and spammers have a subject designed to make you open the message. E.g. Fountain of Youth drink.

Content

A scam or spam email will focus on getting you to click on a link. If you hover the cursor over the link you’ll be able to see where the link would take you and it’s very often somewhere different to where it says. E.g. the link says ‘Satander Accounts’ but the actual link is to some meaningless URL you don’t recognise. Even a one character difference between what is says and the actual link can prove it’s a scam e.g. the link says barclaysbank.co.uk but the link is actually to barclaybank.co.uk which will be a scam site.

Sometimes, scam and spam emails have grammatical errors or are just badly written and often they impose a sense of urgency (you must act now to save your account).

If the content of the message is a picture rather than text – this can mean scam or spam.

Be vigilant over all emails and don’t be caught out.

July 9, 2016

What Are Those Time-Wasters Up To Now?

So, what rubbish emails and calls have there been to Brooklands Radio station in the last few days?

An offer to put 2 million banner adverts on the Internet over a 4 week period for just £645 – You can see why there are so many ads on the Internet – they are very cheap but also largely ineffective.

A Chinese printing company wanting to do our printing at low prices – it isn’t real though. Just someone looking for leads to sell.

A moron offering the recipe for a drink that can solve all problems known to mankind. And the end of the message includes half a page of random words – trying to foil the spam catcher software into thinking it’s not spam. But it so obviously is just that.

An email offering to compare accountants. The message is from [email protected] which is a giveaway that it’s just someone looking for leads to sell to accountancy companies.

A genuine email from an organisation that does language translation for business – harmless but no use to us as a volunteer radio station. The email goes on about international competitors taking our business and how much more profitable international work can be. Irrelevant.

These people just waste our time and clog up the Internet with rubbish.

July 2, 2016

What Are Those Time-Wasters Up To Now?

So, what rubbish emails and calls have there been to Brooklands Radio station in the last few days

A common spam email about hand held card payment machines – but in French to a .co.uk Internet address – That’s just dumb!

A typical 419 scam email about £19.850,000 in a London Bank for me to collect 50% of for just pretending to be the heir to a long dead American – Yup I’m certain this is all true and the money’s waiting for me. I’ll just have to pay the processing charges or something similar then never hear from my accomplice ever again.

Apparently I have been selected to win a brand new iPhone 6S – Fantastic, except that it’s just from a lead generation company looking for idiots who respond to these kind of messages.

An email claiming to have ‘The final version of the report’ enclosed. It says

Ola Hebert asked me to send you the attached WORD document which contains the final version of the report. Please let me know if you have any questions on the contents of the report.

Kind regards, Bob Rodriguez, Key Account Director.

This is all rubbish of course, designed to get you to open the attached Zip file which will not be a report but something rather more nasty. To make it more obvious, the next email is exactly the same message but with names changed. Pathetic.

These people just waste our time and clog up the Internet with rubbish.

June 26, 2016

Stupidest Scam or Spam of the Week

An email from Amelia Lily ([email protected]) titled ‘I am thinking of you’

This is clearly intended to be romantic and supposedly contains her attached photos.

It warns – see the photos but quickly remove them.

That suggests they are naughty photos.

But the desired effect is cancelled by the fact that the scammer is too dumb to hide the addresses of the recipients so you can see it’s been sent to hundreds of men. The names are all similar to mine which suggests it’s one of a set of probably many thousands of such emails sent out.

Romantic – I don’t think so.

Just dumb!

June 25, 2016

Those Time-Wasters

So, what rubbish emails and calls have there been to Brooklands Radio station in the last few days?

Energy GB sent us an email titled ‘You Could Save Over £350 On Your Annual Energy Costs” – we don’t pay energy bills as that’s included in our annual rent. Therefore Energy GB would have to pay us £350 per year for their claim to be true.

Malaga Parking. An exciting new Malaga Airport Parking Opportunity- Really? Could anyone be taken in by such rubbish?

Tickets for a band called Freestyle performing at the Cutting Room in New York city – we aint exactly in or near to New Your city so why would anyone send us this? It doesn’t even say what date they are on. Dumb.

Get free quotes from leading debt collection agencies. So its not even a business – just an aggregator of debt collection agencies. But we’re a volunteer organisation. NO bad debts.

Andrea from Bensheng Furniture Factory wants to make furniture for us to sell in England – There is a Bensheng furniture business in China but do they really think the best way to find partners in the UK is to send out huge volumes of spam messages to random companies ? How many UK business sell furniture? – must be less than one in a thousand.

These people just waste our time and clog up the Internet with rubbish.